Easy Ways to Increase the Time Visitors Spend on Your Website

You love your brand new WordPress website and you are pretty sure that your clients/customers and prospects will as well. You have begun creating some great content to attract those all-important visitors and as the site is SEO optimized then you are hoping to begin climbing up the search rankings quickly as well.

Attracting lots of new visitors is a wonderful thing, but more important than doing that even is encouraging them to stick around for a while. The longer a user spends on your site each time they visit will not only help increase engagement and conversions but your bounce rate (the amount of time spent on your site) is an important ranking factor for SEO.

Having great content onsite is obviously a big advantage, but ideally you want visitors to read more than one piece. Yet another of the advantages of WordPress is that there are a numbers of easy ways you can persuade even the busiest web surfer to linger a little longer.

Implement Infinite Scroll

You may have noticed recently that many news websites have a new feature. Just when you think you have scrolled through a page full of posts even more begin to load automatically. This is called infinite scroll and it is a great way to hold a reader’s interest, especially if you devote a little extra effort to coming up with some eye catching post or page titles.

As this looks so visually striking you may think that infinite scroll is the result of some pricey extra programming but if your site is built on WordPress adding this feature is as easy as installing a single plug in like the easy to remember Infinite-Scroll. Alternately you can activate the official WordPress utility JetPack which also adds the feature if you want it.

Offer Related Content Notifications

Another great way to keep people interested and on the site is to offer them more of the same engaging content as they just read through, or even another great product similar to the one that first caught their eye. Again, within WordPress this can be easily implemented using an intuitive ‘set it and forget it’ plugin such as nrelate Related Content.

Think Visually

Study after study has shown that the more visually appealing a site is the more likely people are to linger. In fact in one recent study conducted by the search engine optimization giants Moz found that if a website made use of prominent imagery within its content the average on-site time increased from from 1 minute to 2.5 minutes, which, to do the maths for you is a 150% boost.

Adding images to any WordPress page or post is about as simple as it gets and there are some wonderful gallery options available to help make a website in any niche more appealing visually.

Offer a Wider Variety of Social Interaction Opportunities

The social interaction opportunities that can be added to a WordPress powered site go far beyond simply adding a ‘share this’ button for FaceBook and Twitter. Take commenting for example. Implementing an integration that allows a user to leave a comment via their Facebook, Twitter or G+ accounts rather than having to spend time creating yet another account is a proven way to increase the number of genuine comments, reviews and other interactions visitors engage in while visiting the site.